Hollywood’s war against The Pirate Bay website continues in Europe with yet another legal battle. Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN is taking the operator of the popular proxy site Kuiken.co to court, demanding the shutdown of the service as well as a ban on encouraging others to circumvent court-ordered blockades. Tristan, the operator of the proxy, is prepared to fight in court and is running a crowdfunding project to support his legal battle.

Over the past year several ISPs across Europe have been ordered to censor The Pirate Bay.

In the Netherlands and several other countries these blockades are supposed prevent the majority of the public from accessing the infamous BitTorrent site.

However, thus far the blockades haven’t been very effective. Instead, they caused a traffic shift from the main Pirate Bay site to the many proxies out there.

These proxies render the court orders useless.

In an attempt to take these proxies offline, Hollywood backed anti-piracy group BREIN asked the court to declare them unlawful. Over the past month the group obtained injunctions against several proxy sites, and have used these to convince dozens of others to shut down.

Facing thousands of euros in penalties most Dutch proxy owners, including the local Pirate Party, were quick to throw in the towel. But not all have done so. Tristan, the owner of several proxies including Kuiken.co sails on for now, despite two preliminary injunctions.

“I ran a proxy long before BREIN got the court rulings against the major ISPs,” Tristan tells TorrentFreak. However, when the court order was handed down BREIN wanted Tristan to stop.

“After the court order they started to harass me with their minor successes in censoring the Dutch Internet. They wanted me to cooperate since they had some court rulings in their favor.”

These demands were soon followed by an ex-parte injunction against the operator, who has now been sued as he continues to allow people to bypass the ISP blockades.

In their complaint BREIN wants the proxy operator to shut down his site Kuiken.co. In addition, they want the court to prevent him from linking to other proxies or encouraging the public to access The Pirate Bay in any other way.

The anti-piracy group argues that The Pirate Bay is willingly facilitating copyright infringement, and profiting from it. Since the Kuiken.co proxy is a one-on-one copy of The Pirate Bay is has to be stopped as well.

On the other hand, Tristan believes that access to information should be free. He is therefore prepared to go to court and has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to support this effort.

The crowdfunding campaign

“In the short run I hope to win this court case since it could create a precedent for similar sites, and defend people’s right to access information. It would most definitely prevent further censorship by private organizations,” Tristan tells us.

“I won’t step back for copyright monopolies who want to stay in the stone age forever, as long as it’s good for them. I believe we have the right to protect ourselves against tyranny, and as a pacifist information is my weapon of choice,” he adds.

Thus far the campaign has already raised nearly 5,000 euros thanks to a feature on the popular Dutch blog Geenstijl. This should be nearly enough to start building a defense, but more donations are welcomed by the proxy owner.

Tristan has chosen lawyer Mark Krul of Wisemen Solicitors to represent him in court. Krul is also working on the appeal of the Dutch Pirate Party, who were previously ordered to stop hosting or linking to Pirate Bay proxies.

Thus far the Dutch courts haven’t been very receptive of the arguments of those who say the Pirate Bay should remain accessible, but that won’t prevent Tristan from fighting.

“We shouldn’t condone censorship in any way. In the long run I hope we will have real freedom of communication,” Tristan says.